“Neocentrism”: Another Name for the Failed Bipartisan Consensus on Foreign Policy

Jonathan Schanzer proposes a modified neoconservative policy under the unappealing label of “neocentrist”:

What is neocentrism, exactly? It’s just starting to take form. It will embrace America’s power, but not abuse it. It might reject aspects of neoconservatism, but not the important moral commitments or valid views of global dangers that gave rise to that movement. It will reject aspects of the Obama Doctrine, but not the need for a somber accounting of the potential costs of putting boots on the ground or getting embroiled in expensive foreign conflicts. And above all, it will reject the growing isolationist wings of both parties, which seek to retreat from the world’s problems and renounce American exceptionalism in the process.

Since it is difficult to identify what “the Obama Doctrine” is at any given time, and since “Obama Doctrine” means extremely different things to different groups, this doesn’t tell us very much. Because Schanzer doesn’t describe which “aspects of neoconservatism” a so-called neocentrist foreign policy would reject, neocentrism could be just another clunky name for the same failed ideology. Neoconservatives consistently exaggerate some foreign threats and invent others, so it’s not clear which “valid views of global dangers” Schanzer means. Based on the limited description offered here, Obama’s foreign policy could almost qualify as “neocentrist” if the label weren’t being invented mainly to berate Obama for not being hawkish enough.

If “neocentrism” will avoid the abuse of American power, it would be useful for Schanzer to explain what he thinks its proper use is. It is likely that anyone inclined to endorse “neocentrism” has a radically different understanding of what constitutes abuse of power from most Americans today, because the former believe that the exercise of that power, especially hard power, is almost always efficacious and legitimate. “Neocentrism” appears to be nothing more than the old “centrist” foreign policy identified with McCain and Lieberman in the past, which was defined by its reflexive hawkishness and also by the contempt that “centrists” of both parties had for the views of most Americans. If that’s right, neocentrism doesn’t need to be invented, because we have already been living with its failures for more than a decade. It certainly isn’t a solution to anything that ails U.S. foreign policy. It is just another rehashed bipartisan version of the ideas that have propelled the U.S. into one unnecessary conflict after another.

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13 Responses to “Neocentrism”: Another Name for the Failed Bipartisan Consensus on Foreign Policy

This sounds like the centrist parties in Israel or the definition of the Ross Perot Prez. run, in which we have a centrist POV that sounds like it fits nicely between opposing sides but can not define it policies. Of course it sounds good to say America will be the world’s police without abusing it but leaves two problems. What happens when the USS ends up abusing the power? And this requires the US to foot the resources and the spend the money. In all reality, Obama potential excerise in Syria could pass the reasonable intervention as chemical weapons were used. However, that still was not the right choice.

Sounds like the same ole, same ole to me. Iran and Syria and so on pose “grave danger” to the USA, rather than, as is obvious to anyone with an ounce of discernment, the other way around.

Neo con BS version 2.0, with just a pinch of neo liberal international “human rights” interventionism added, to provide some basis, however weak, for the label “centrist.”

As an aside, take this gem:

“…we chose not to have a foreign policy, choosing instead to focus on domestic considerations in the wake of a debilitating recession. But that strategy is obviously not risk-free. The Syrian slaughter that the United States has chosen to largely ignore, currently tallied at 110,000, is rapidly reaching the estimated 125,000 civilians killed in the wake of America’s Iraq intervention.”

First of all, notice the slight of hand, metric change….total number of dead in Syria versus civilian dead in Iraq. Secondly, what is the meaning of the comparison, even if there was no metric change? What does the death toll in Syria, which we did not cause, have to do with the death toll in Iraq, which we are largely responsible for? The author himself claims that the USA has “ignored” the conflict in Syria. If that is so, then the dead are not on our conscience, unless one is going to claim that whenever someone kills someone else, anywhere in the world, it is the fault of the USA, because it could have, theoretically, stopped it, but didn’t. Talk about blame America first! That kind of argument would give a died in the wool, Berkeley radical pause! Thirdly, what is the “risk” here, from the US perspective? As far as I know, no Americans have been killed in Syria. Whether the Syrian civil war death toll is one hundred thousand or one million or three, that hardly poses any kind of “risk” for the USA.

Moving on…

“And the longer the United States has stayed on the sidelines, the stronger al Qaeda has grown, threatening not only Syria, but also its neighbors. The lesson here is that doing nothing can sometimes be just as dangerous as doing too much.”

WTF?! Neo cons and neo libs (and now, I suppose, “neo centrists” too) are calling for US intervention AGAINST the Assad regime. How is that going to hurt “Al Qaeda?” Or, more accurately, Islamic extremist terrorists? Assad is a secular, nationalist Arab ruler, his regime, whatever its faults, is not one of religious extremism. And it has worked with the USA in its war on terrorism. What makes the author think that the rebels in Syria, which are more than rumored to include Islamic extremist terrorists, would be any better, and not in fact a whole lot worse, in this regard, should they succeed?

All of this is incoherent gibberish. Perhaps that’s a good sign. The neo cons are so far out of touch, so extreme, so divorced from reality, that they literally can no longer produce an intelligible argument.

I think that NeoCentrism thing is just another name for party purity/excluding other povs.
The US foreign policy already excludes, completely and often to its detriment, the pov of most other actors on the international stage.
This exclusion of povs is now increasingly applied towards other Americans. It will not stop, and the upsurge of a “wait, what the hell are we doing in the middle east” sentiment will make the neocons (whatever their label) dig in their heels.

He was against interventionism by the way. He once said a precondition to any war should be to get the support of the American people: “first commit the nation, then commit the troops,” he said. That’s a lesson he said was learned from Vietnam. He also argued he wouldn’t support a war that he wouldn’t want his own son to die for.

At the same time, he’s always felt that if America starts something we should live up to our commitments and bear them out. That’s why, during Vietnam, he supported Nixon’s call to “end the war honorably,” and his Vietnamization program. And why he opposed the Iraq War, but still thought it needed to be carried through, and the troops supported. He lamented the attacks on the soldiers, just like he lamented the attacks on the soldiers during the Vietnam War era.

Sounds like a good centrist approach to me. Better than “neo-centrism.”

Everybody wants to claim the “center”. That way anybody who is opposed to you is on the “fringe”. The overwhelming majority of Americans are on the fringe therefore for their opposition to the Centrist Obama on Syria. Two semesters of linguistics should be required for a high school diploma.